Thursday, 26 October 2017

Omber Adds glTF 2.0 Export

I wasn't planning on adding support for another file format for Omber, but I was so impressed with the new glTF 2.0 file format that I couldn't help myself. glTF 2.0 is a new format for 3d graphics. In the picture above, you can see an Omber drawing that I've imported into a web-based gltf viewer using the glTF format. Being able to export to glTF means that it's possible to export Omber data in a vector format to game engines or into 3d animation tools. For example, if you wanted to show a SVG drawing in a game but with no loss of detail on screens of different sizes, you could use Omber to convert the SVG drawing into a triangle mesh for the game using the glTF format. Although support for the glTF format isn't widespread yet, when glTF support is added to various 3d animation tools, it will be possible to take your Omber drawings and animated them using those tools.

I had previously added support for COLLADA export specifically for handling these use cases, but unfortunately, the support for importing COLLADA files in other programs was very unreliable and inconsistent, so it was never 100% certain whether the data exported by Omber would be imported fully by other programs. glTF is a much more straight-forward and well-specified format, so the glTF files created by Omber should import much more easily in other programs when glTF support becomes more widespread.